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Five things that mess up your backups

Backup is still the greatest pain point for storage managers. The following five vexing backup problems can become less onerous if you use these simple procedures to improve your backup performance and reliability. Unhappy tape drives unhappy tape drives cause more backup and restore issues than any other problem. The most common thing to fail in most backup environments is a tape or tape drive. Tape error may frequently masquerade as another problem. (For example, one backup software product often reflects a drive failure as a network timeout.) And because most environments achieve less than half of the available throughput of their drives, corporate IT buys more and more drives to meet the throughput demands of the backup system. Modern tape drives are designed to operate at their advertised speeds, and operating them at lower speeds is what causes them to fail more often; there's a minimum speed at which the tape must move past the head to achieve a good signal-to-noise ratio. Even variable speed tape drives have a minimum ...

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Data backups are still job No. 1--and problem No. 1--for most storage managers. In this article, backup guru W. Curtis Preston describes the five most prevalent backup system problems and explains what you can do to prevent or remedy them.

Whether it's the result of a merger or just good housekeeping, at some point in time storage managers will have a storage consolidation project. The Missouri state government embarked on a major storage consolidation project that included numerous political and technical hurdles.

Data moves. Or, it has to be moved when you're refreshing array technology, merging storage resources with an acquired company or shifting data around to more economical tiers. Data migration is a common task, but it's often a difficult one. We describe some technologies and tools to ease the pain of data migrations.

Our sixth annual Storage Salary Survey shows storage salaries are rising overall, and climbing even higher as the number of terabytes managed increases. Experienced storage pros remain in demand but many respondents say that heavier workloads, smaller staffs, longer hours and tighter budgets are all contributing to stress and making the job of managing storage even tougher.

Power and cooling isn't just a problem for the data center. According to Gartner Inc., storage managers place power consumption in a three-way tie for last place in terms of their concerns, a clear example of organizational misalignment.